Over the last decade information engineering has become the methodology of choice for developing information systems. There are as many definitions of information engineering as there are practitioners of the techniques. This paper addresses information engineering from a practical perspective; it discusses how information engineering techniques can be applied to the real-life problem of identifying system requirements and satisfying those requirements with a computer-based information system. The paper also shows that information engineering, rather than being a new methodology, is made up of components of existing methodologies